Relationships
Financial Matters in relationships
Recent work in our lab has examined how financial matters are handled between partners in a romantic relationship. We are interested to find out which factors contribute to conflict about finances and how partners influence each other’s spending.
Here is a very brief video explaining one of our studies that used reddit posts to discover the types of conflicts people experience when fighting about money. And here is the full article describing this research!
Other research on finances in relationship:
Peetz, J., & Joseph, M.* (2024). How couples think about money: Types of money motives and relationship satisfaction. Personal Relationships.
Peetz, J., Fisher-Skau, O.*, & Joel, S. (in press). How individuals perceive their partner’s relationship behaviors when worrying about finances. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
Joseph, M.*, & Peetz, J. (2023) Financial snooping: Financial stress and anxiety promote intrusive attitudes towards partner’s finances. Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 1-14.
Peetz, J. Meloff, Z.*, & Royle, C.* (2023). When couples fight about money, what do they fight about?. Journal of Personal and Social Relationships, 02654075231187897
Relationship appraisals over time
One aspect of research on relationships in our lab is about people’s appraisals of their relationships over time. Do people accurately predict how they and their partner have changed and will change? One common mistake in appraisals of relationships over time is that people think their past relationships were way worse than they actually were: an ex-appraisal bias. This bias might actually help them feel better about their current, new relationships!
See Aidan Smyth talk about this work at CTV News: Link to video
Smyth, A. P., Peetz, J., & Capaldi, A. A. (2020). Ex-appraisal bias: Negative illusions in appraising relationship quality retrospectively. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 37(5), 1673-1680.
Other research on relationships from our lab
Joel, S., Maxwell, J., Khera, D., Peetz, J., Baucom, B. R., MacDonald, G. (2023). Expect and You Shall Perceive: People Who Expect Better in Turn Perceive Better Behaviors from Their Romantic Partners. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000411
Peetz, J., & Howard, A. (2022). People prefer to diversify help across different types of prosocial behavior. British Journal of Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12519
Peetz, J., & Milyavskaya, M. (2021). A self-determination theory approach to predicting daily prosocial behavior. Motivation and Emotion, 1-14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-021-09902-5
Peetz, J., Wohl, M., & Wilson, A. & Dawson, A. (2021). A chip off the (im)moral block? Lay beliefs about genetic heritability predict whether family members’ actions affect self-judgments. European Journal for Social Psychology.
Peetz, J., & Grossmann, I. (2020). Wise reasoning about the future is associated with adaptive interpersonal feelings after relational challenges. Social Psychological and Personality Science. DOI: 1948550620931985
Peetz, J., Milyavskaya, M., & Kammrath, L. (2020). How partner-oriented decisions benefit relationships: An experience sampling study. Personal Relationships. DOI: 10.1111/pere.12357
Peetz, J. & Howard, A. (2020). Balancing prosocial effort across social categories: Mental accounting heuristics in helping decisions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. DOI: 0146167220976683
Harasymchuk, C., Peetz, J., Fehr, B., & Chowdhury, S. (2020). Worn Out Relationship? The Role of Growth and Security Expectations in Judgments and Experiences of Relational Boredom. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. DOI: 10.1111/pere.12354
Smyth, A. P., Peetz, J., & Capaldi, A. A. (2020). Ex-appraisal bias: Negative illusions in appraising relationship quality retrospectively. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 37(5), 1673-1680.
Peetz, J., Maccosham, A., & May, K. (2019). Through your partner’s eyes: Perspective taking tempers optimism in behavior predictions. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(3), 785-808.
Harasymchuk, C., Cloutier, A., Peetz, J., & Lebreton, J. (2016). Spicing up the relationship?: Shared leisure activity choices as responses to relational boredom. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 34(6), 833-854.
Cloutier, A., & Peetz, J. (2016). People they are a changin’: The links between anticipating change and relationship quality. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 34(5), 676-698.
Cloutier, A., & Peetz, J. (2016). Relationships’ best friend: Links between pet ownership, empathy, and romantic relationship outcomes. Anthrozoos, 29(3), 395-408.
Bacev-Giles, C., & Peetz, J. (2016). Thinking big or small: Does mental abstraction affect social network organization? PLoS One. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0147325
Kammrath, L. K., Peetz, J., Hara, K., Demarco, A., Wood, K., Meirovich, H., & Allen, T. (2015). It’s a matter of time: The effect of depletion on helpful behavior in romantic relationships is moderated by relationship length. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109 (2), 276-291.
Cortes, K., Kammrath, L. K., Scholer, A., & Peetz, J. (2014). Self-regulating the effortful “Do’s” in relationships: A domain specific approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106, 380-397.
Peetz, J., & Kammrath, L. K. (2013). Folk understandings of self-regulation in relationships: Recognizing the importance of self-regulatory ability for others, but not the self. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49, 712-718.
Kammrath, L., & Peetz, J. (2012). You promised you’d change: How incremental and entity theorists react to a romantic partner’s change attempts. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 570-574.
Peetz, J., & Kammrath, L. (2011). Only because I love you: Why people make and why they break romantic promises. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 887-904.